The opportunity to personalize features in a mobile vehicle is ever increasing as the automobile is being transformed into a communications and entertainment platform as well as a transportation platform. Many new cars will be installed with some type of telematics unit to provide wireless communication and location-based services. These services may be accessed through interfaces such as voice-recognition computer applications, touch-screen computer displays, computer keyboards, or a series of buttons on the dashboard or console of a vehicle.
Currently, telematics service call centers, in-vehicle compact disk (CD) or digital video display (DVD) media, web portals, and voice-enabled phone portals provide various types of location services, including driving directions, stolen vehicle tracking, traffic information, weather reports, restaurant guides, ski reports, road condition information, accident updates, street routing, landmark guides, and business finders.
For example, traffic and driving directions may be accessed through a voice portal that uses incoming number identification to generate location information based on the area code or prefix of the phone number, or to access location information stored in a user's profile associated with the phone number. Users may be prompted to enter more details through a voice interface. Other examples are web and wireless portals that offer location-based services such as maps and driving directions where the user enters both a start and end addresses. Some of these services may have a voice interface.
One method of delivering routing services includes an advisor at a call center providing verbal directions to a user after the user provides the origination and destination location's to the advisor. The user is required to remember all the directions received from the advisor. It is sometimes difficult for the user to recall complex directions. In that case, the user can write down the directions and refer to the written directions while driving to the destination location. Reading directions while driving may have unintended consequences.
Another method of delivering routing services includes receiving packet data from an off-board navigation server. The telematics unit uses the packet data to establish a point-to-point wireless session with the off-board navigation server to obtain real-time directions. The directions are displayed in the vehicle as each turn is about to be implemented. In some cases, the map database in the off-board navigation server does not include needed data for both the origination and destination locations. In some cases, the packet data is corrupted during delivery so the point-to-point wireless session with the off-board navigation server cannot be established.
On-board navigation units include an on-board navigation database that was previously downloaded, i.e. from a DVD, into a memory in the on-board navigation unit. In some cases, the on-board navigation database of the on-board navigation unit does not include both the origination and destination locations. This is not uncommon since the on-board map database is generally not updated as frequently as the map database in the off-board navigation server. However, the on-board navigation unit may be the preferred method to obtain directions, if the on-board database includes both the origination and destination locations, since data delivery problems are not an issue.
On-board navigation units may also have the option to download map data from a map database in the call center to obtain directions to a destination location. In this case, the data for the directions is downloaded via a wireless connection to the on-board navigation unit in the vehicle. The map database in the call center may not include both the origination and destination locations although the call center map databases are generally updated more frequently than the on-board navigation database. As with the off-board navigation service option, data delivery can become an issue.
In a conventional route delivery, a user who requests directions is provided with a first routing service. If the first routing service fails due to unavailability or inaccuracy due to data errors, a second routing service option is provided. If the second routing service option fails, a third routing service option is provided. In the event that there is one or more failure of one or more successive service options, the user is required to wait for the failures to occur before a successful routing is provided.
It is desirable, therefore, to provide a method, system and computer usable medium that dynamically selects a routing service option from among more than one routing service option by monitoring the decision points in which availability of the routing service option is determined. It is further desirable that a user is not required to wait for a routing service option to fail before being provided with a successful routing option.